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By Stephen Magagnini
Bee Staff Writer
Published Jan. 18, 1998
When news of the Gold Rush reached Canton in 1848, thousands of young Chinese mortgaged
their futures and boarded boats to "Gum Shan," or "Gold Mountain," as California was known.
It was a dangerous gamble, but they had little to lose: Canton (Kwangtung) province was torn by
civil war, floods, droughts, typhoons and other disasters.
By 1852, 25,000 Chinese had reached Gold Mountain. The 1852 census showed 804 Chinese
males and 10 females in Sacramento.
Most had to work off the cost of their passage (between $30 and $125), and few struck it rich in
the gold fields. But they would transform Gold Mountain, and America.
From the time they landed, they patiently worked long hours for low pay, quickly earning the
resentment of their white competitors. In 1849, white miners drove off a team of 60 Chinese
miners working for a British company at Chinese Camp in Tuolumne County.
By 1852, white miners had driven hundreds of Chinese from Columbia, Yuba City, Horseshoe
Bar, Mormon Bar and other diggings. In 1856, Chinese at Mokelumne Hill in Calaveras County
paid $70,000 for mining rights and "protection." In 1862, an "anti-coolie" club formed in San
Francisco.
According to Hutching's Illustrated California magazine, "With the exception of leading Chinese
merchants we have had the opportunity to observe only the most unfavorable specimens of this
race ... throngs of coolies and degraded women."
Some Chinese women became prostitutes to work off their passage. The first was Madame Ah
Toy, who landed in San Francisco in 1850 and quickly became famous. She bought her freedom,
opened dives in San Francisco and Sacramento and returned to China a wealthy woman.
In Fiddletown, Amador County, the 1860 census showed 2,000 Chinese men and six "women of
pleasure," according to Dr. Herbert Yee, a prominent dentist, philanthropist and historian whose
great-grandfather, Yee Fung Cheung arrived here in 1850 and soon made his way to Fiddletown.
When gold mining didn't pan out, Yee, 25, unpacked his herbal medicines and began treating his
countrymen, and, gradually, other nationalities. So genial was Yee, it was said, "it was only a
dose of his smile they needed."
Yee prospered, opening a second store in Virginia City to capitalize on the 1859 Comstock Lode
silver strike in Nevada. Yee's "Chew Kee Store" in Fiddletown -- the only Gold Rush-era
emporium still intact -- has been preserved as a historic site.
Yee's most famous patient was the wife of Gov. Leland Stanford, who called Chinese
immigrants the "dregs of Asia" in his 1862 inaugural address and urged their expulsion.
But when Jane Stanford contracted a seemingly incurable pulmonary disease, the governor's
minions tracked Yee down in a gambling hall in Sacramento's Chinatown on I Street between
Front and Sixth streets. Yee stopped playing mah-jongg and cured Jane Stanford with majaung, a
natural source of ephedrine. One of Yee's great-great-grandsons, Dr. Allen Yee, is now a
pulmonary specialist in Sacramento, one of a long line of Yee healers.
Stanford never got Yee's name right, calling him "T. Wah Hing," the name of the men's club Yee
frequented. Yee's son Yee Lock Sam adopted the name, listing himself in a 1901 Sacramento
Bee ad as "Dr. T. Wah Hing, Physician and Surgeon. Eye, ear, nose and throat."
Yee returned to China in 1904 a rich man. His legacy includes the 3,000-member Yee Family
Association of Sacramento.
Like other non-whites, Chinese could not testify against whites in court, and many were the
victims of racist savagery. In Nevada City, a Chinese miner was hanged for stealing a mule --
only to have the mule's supposed owner show up and say his mule was a "jack," not the "jenny"
owned by the Chinese miner.
Some Chinese, infected with gold fever, "chased gold all the way to Vancouver, Idaho and
Alaska," said historian Sylvia Sun Minnick.
Despite the virulent racism they faced, many Chinese stuck it out as cooks, cigar makers,
restaurateurs, vegetable farmers and merchants. The first Chinese laundry opened in San
Francisco, or "Dai Fow" (Big City) in 1851; a thousand more followed.
Hundreds of Chinese lived in wood and canvas buildings in Sacramento or "Yee Fow" (second
city).
In 1854, the First Chinese Baptist Church and the Chinese Benevolent Association opened here,
and they operate to this day. In 1856, the first Chinese-language daily in America, the Chinese
News, rolled off the presses. The Canton Chinese Theater featured puppet shows and roving
minstrels and in 1855 presented Chinese operas for an all-white audience. Gambling halls,
temples, fortune tellers and laundries also abounded in Sacramento's "Chinadom."
Though frequently crippled by floods or fire, it was quickly rebuilt. Minnick said, "The resilient
nature of Chinese businessmen... (is) best tested after natural disasters." Four months after the
July 1854 fire, five markets, one general store, a bar, a boardinghouse and three gambling houses
received new business licenses.
In 1863, California's 25,000 Chinese miners enjoyed their best year, pulling gold out El Dorado,
Placer, Amador, Calaveras, Butte and Trinity counties. But by 1868, nearly all had left the
mines. Some joined the new wave of Chinese immigrants who came to build the western leg of
the transcontinental railroad, completed in 1869.
They were hired by Charles Crocker, who figured if their ancestors could build the Great Wall
over mountains and tundra, they could lay track over the Sierra Nevada.
Chinese later played a huge role in California's agricultural development, building Delta levees
based on the Pearl River Delta in Kwangtung province, planting orchards and raising potatoes,
onions and asparagus.
A smattering of East Indians, Malays and South Sea Islanders also made it to the Gold Rush.
Chief among those were the "Kanakas" (native Hawaiians), great sailors who worked on many of
the schooners that came to California. John Sutter, who sailed to Sacramento from Honolulu with
a crew of 10 Hawaiians, said "I could not have settled this country without the aid of the
Kanakas."
Sutter's many wives included Manaiki, a gift from the Hawaiian king. Many Hawaiians,
including members of Sutter's crew, married Maidu and other Indian women, and some were
marched at gunpoint to Round Valley Reservation on California's Trail of Tears in 1863.
Kanaka colonies sprang up throughout the gold country, and California first "Good Humor" man,
Charlie O'Kaaina, supposedly sold ice cream from his ice wagon in the Sierra foothills.
Copyright © The Sacramento Bee
http://www.learncalifornia.org/doc.asp?id=1933
In the rough and tumble justice of the mining camps, unpopular minorities invariably
suffered under the violent and well-armed majority. Most mining camps sought to forbid
certain minorities from competing for claims, in particular Chinese and Mexican miners were
chased off claims and driven from mining camps. In 1849, a group of miners calling
themselves the "hounds" rampaged through "little Chile," a tent city of Chilean miners
outside of San Francisco, killing a woman and beating several men. A group of San
Francisco businessmen, uncomfortable with the thought of independent gangs roving the
countryside, sought to bring the Hounds to justice, and provided some assistance to the
victims.
Chinese were especially despised, embodying to the nativist American the ultimate
foreigner. Almost 700 Chinese miners had responded to the earliest rumors of gold in ’48,
accounting for roughly a seventh of the 48ers. By 1852, there were 25,000 Chinese in
California, making them the largest ethnic minority. They were banned from the most
current diggings. Many set about working claims that had been abandoned as unprofitable
by white miners, patiently sifting out what gold remained. Others opened restaurants,
laundries, and dry good stores, sometimes making more money performing services for
miners than the average miner could hope to make in the diggings.
Mexicans, many from the Mexican state of Sonora, formed another major minority groups.
They too were banned from many diggings, or were relegated like the Chinese to exhausted
diggings. Some worked as day laborers, willing to work for lower wages than white miners
did. Yet in some areas, particularly in the Southern Diggings, Mexicans formed a majority.
The mining camp of Sonora, for example, was named after the home state of its Mexican
inhabitants.
In 1850, the Legislature passed the first law taxing foreign miners, who were required to
pay $20 dollars a month for a license to work the gold fields, obstinately to reimburse the
state the costs of protecting them and keeping order. While a miner on a prosperous claim
(a good claim returned about $16 dollars a day) could easily afford such a tax, foreign
miners were already relegated to less prosperous claims, and could ill afford to pay. Some
10,000 Mexicans left the state in disgust. The Legislature repealed the onerous $20 tax in
1851, but instituted a $3 dollar a month foreign miners tax in 1852.
The anti-foreigner sentiment of the state led to the dramatic success of the American or
"Know Nothing" Party in the state election of 1855, where Know Nothing candidate James
Neely Johnson, only 26 years old, was elected governor, and the Know Nothings gained
impressive majorities in both houses of the legislature. The American Party, which enjoyed
short-lived success nationwide in the 1850s, was in most parts of the country a response to
the influx of Catholic immigrants in the 1840s and 1850s. Most Know Nothings emphasized
the need to protect the jobs and votes of native born protestant Americans. In California,
however, nativity and religions were secondary concerns of the American Party, which
focused its tract against racial minorities. However, once elected, the Know Nothings carried
out no comprehensive program. Johnson proved unable to deal with the real problems
California faced, floundering before the Vigilance Committees. The Know Nothing Party
eventually died out in California, with most of its members absorbed into the freshly formed
Republican Party. The anti-Oriental sentiment of the Know Nothings remained a constant in
California politics for another century.
Ironically, racial tensions played a major role in ensuring that California would join the
Union as a free state. Such status was never guaranteed, and in 1849 many Southerners
wished that the southern portion of the future state might by portioned off so that slavery
might extend all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Few of the miners who came to California
were abolitionists. However, they feared competition, and worried that slave-owning miners
might use their slaves to work multiple claims, edging out free miners. When the Texan Col.
Thomas Jefferson Green attempted to work his claim with slaves, the miners of the camp
quickly gathered in a town meeting, resolving that no black, free or slave, could engage in
mining. Similar codes were promulgated across California. There were few free blacks in
Gold Rush California, for they were decidedly unwelcome, to the point that in 1858 the
legislature attempted to pass a law banning the immigration of free blacks to the state.
For the Indians of interior California, whose lives remained relatively untouched by the
missions, the Gold Rush was a disaster of apocalyptic proportions. The miners brought a
fresh wave of diseases that decimated their number, while miners overran their territories.
Some Indians attempted to fight back; others attempted to make the most of the situation
by stealing what they could from the miner’s. Numerous small but violent clashes ensued, in
which the heavily armed miners, who were warned by their charlatan guidebooks to
purchase rifles, shotguns, revolvers, and bowie knifes for defense against Indians, almost
invariably were victorious. Miners organized themselves into gangs to drive natives from the
diggings, while volunteer infantry companies sprang up to engaged in a series of Indian
Wars, which sometimes ended in the massacre of a village by the poorly trained and ineptly
led militia. It is estimated that some 4500 Indians suffered violent deaths between 1849
and 1870, while countless others perished due to disease. Victims of the gold fever, the
Indians wandered the land that had once been theirs, homeless, despised, and miserable.
The environment of the Gold Rush made mistreatment of minorities the norm. Part of it can
be explained by the sudden influx thousands of whites uprooted from provincial
communities, and exposed to the ethnic brew of California. Suddenly confronted by peoples
with foreign languages, customs and religions, they naturally recoiled from the alien. Yet the
Gold Rush was carried out in an atmosphere of panic conducive to violence. The hardships
of the trail must have convinced even the most naïve of the life or death seriousness of their
endeavor. Many Argonauts expressed a near paranoia that the gold would dry up before
they had a chance to prospect. Thus foreigners represented intolerable competition in the
scramble for limited resources and opportunities. Racism thus proved an instrument of
economic allocation—ensuring that claims went to the numerically superior and politically
enfranchised whites. The racial violence of the Gold Rush only emphasized the seriousness
with which whites defended their privileges and purged the competition that minorities
represented.
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http://www.learncalifornia.org/doc.asp?id=1934
Most of the gold extracted from California has since been returned to the earth, sealed in
the well-guarded vaults at Fort Knox. At the time, the discovery of Gold in California,
coupled with gold finds in Australia, significantly increased levels of circulating specie
worldwide. But gold in 1849 was winding down a 5000 year long career as a medium of
economic exchange. In 1862, the U.S. government issued its first unbacked currency
—"greenbacks." The gold-standard ruled supreme briefly in the 19th century, protecting US
currency against inflation, much to the chagrin of agrarian activists who clamored for free
silver. Yet the 20th century dealt gold heady blows, with Franklin Roosevelt taking the U.S.
briefly off the gold standard, and banning domestic transactions with gold. In 1971,
President Richard Nixon took the U.S. permanently off the gold standard, allowing the dollar
to float unbacked on international currency markets.
The worth of all the gold mined from California between 1849 and 1862, about $10 billion in
2002 dollars, pales in comparison to the current worth of California's annual agricultural
output, in 1992 a heady 19.2 billion dollars. For the nation, the Gold Rush was merely an
interesting news story, a pleasant diversion from the escalating sectional tensions that were
tearing the nation apart. It may in the end have only exacerbated those tensions, as
California's sudden demand for statehood as a free state in 1850 caught Congress ill-
prepared to deal with the troubling problem of slavery in the territories wrought from
Mexico. In 1849, many miners claimed that they had "gone to see the elephant," in the
distant gold fields, an expression conjuring the awe and fear of seeing the massive circus
beast. A dozen years later, a new batch of men wrote that they "had seen the elephant,"
this time on the battlegrounds of the Civil War.
The impact of the Gold Rush on California was dramatic. Undoubtedly, California, so well
endowed with the blessings of climate, soil, oil, timber, harbors and other natural resources
would have developed its current prosperity without the Gold Rush. However, the dramatic
population boom precipitated by the Gold Rush ensured California's early admittance into
the Union, bypassing completely the territorial phase and becoming the 31st state in 1850.
Had the population only been supplemented by a gradual filtration of hardy pioneers, rather
than a sudden influx of miners, it's likely that California's admittance would have been
significantly delayed.
California agriculture was jump-started by the Gold Rush. Agriculture during the Mexican
period had been sorely neglected, with the rancheros content merely to breed cattle. The
Americans who arrived in California prior to 1848 seemed to continue this trend, raising
cattle and practicing subsistence agriculture to meet their own needs. However, foothills
filled with 100,000 hungry miners produced a demand for agricultural products, and
California farmers, some busted miners who remained to till the soil, responded.
The Gold Rush also ensured that the first transcontinental railroad would have its Western
terminus in California. Had California remained in pastoral state, it is likely that the first
railroad might have instead run to Oregon, in 1847 the preferred destination of cross-
country migrants.
Three California cities were transformed by the Gold Rush. San Francisco went from being a
quite hamlet with fewer than 500 inhabitants to a booming city and the commercial and
financial center of the West Coast. Sacramento begun as a tiny settlement centered on
Sutter's great estate of New Helvetia, developed into a modest metropolis that would
become the state's capital in 1855. Sacramento growth sprang primarily from its position as
a conduit for supplies from San Francisco up the Sacramento River to the northern diggings.
Likewise, Stockton grew as the way station for goods heading up the San Joaquin River to
the Southern Diggings. Ironically, the cities that grew and flourished in California were not
those whose economies were based not on gold, but rather on commerce, business, and
finance. Gold towns boomed, but their wealth evaporated once the precious ore was
extracted. Today the Mother Lode region represents one of the most economically under-
developed regions of the state, still relying on the legacy of gold to lure tourist dollars.
People, and not gold, are the most precious asset of California. The siren song of gold
brought those people. It brought the first wave of Chinese, who would eventually build the
transcontinental railroad though the Sierra. It brought the Big Four to California, whose
ruthless energy would make that road possible. It brought Samuel Clemens, who launched
himself to fame with the colorful short story "The Celebrated Jumping Frogs of Calaveras
County." It brought 300,000 other people to the state, who once the gold ran dry turned
their attentions to agriculture, industry, and business.
In many ways, gold, and the greed it inspired was a grossly destructive force. It ravaged
the environment, leaving areas that to this day are scared by piles of mining debris. It
decimated the native population. It ruined thousands of lives, luring men away from their
families, cajoling them to make the dangerous passage to California, corrupting them with
the vices of mining life, and breaking them with brutal and often disappointing toil. But the
Gold Rush did ultimately have a constructive end, other than contributing to the dank vaults
of Fort Knox: it was the beginning of the flourishing and mature state of California.
In 1847, an Indian scout took James Marshall to the Maidu village of Koloma, and California
was changed forever.
It was here that Marshall decided to build a sawmill among the evergreens and smooth rocks
along the American River 45 miles northeast of Sacramento.
And it was here that gold was discovered. Marshall generally gets the credit, but some say the
first nugget was found by "Indian Jim," one of the Maidus enlisted by Marshall to dig a channel
to power the sawmill.
Gold had probably been discovered centuries earlier by California's Indians, who considered it
worthless compared to flint, salt, obsidian, turquoise and slate.
But gold was to cost them nearly everything -- their streams, their land, their game, their
freedom, their lives.
In a sense, Indians signed their own death warrant when they went to work for Marshall's boss,
John Sutter, who could never have made a go of it in New Helvetia (Sacramento) without them.
Within a decade, as many as 100,000 of the 170,000 Indians living in California had died, "the
majority from violence, the rest from disease and starvation," said Dr. Edward Castillo, a
Cahuilla Indian who teaches at Sonoma State University.
"The spirit that owns the yellow metal is a bad spirit," a Nisenan chief supposedly said. "It will
drive you crazy if you possess it."
But in those euphoric first months of 1848, Indians were among the first to catch gold fever.
About 1,000 Indians panned for gold with baskets and wooden bowls at Dry Diggings
(Placerville).
That summer, Indians struck gold on creeks in Stanislaus and Calaveras counties, and the rush to
the Southern Mines was on. By year's end, 4,000 Indians were working the gold fields, compared
with 2,000 whites.
In 1849, Indians invented the "Long Tom" (later known as a "sluice box"), an oblong box that
caught gold particles.
A Miwok found a five-pound nugget at Murphy's Camp, and many Indians earned food, clothes
and blankets for their families. But elders feared that Indians would forsake their traditional
lifestyle, which generally placed community welfare over individual enrichment and relied on
the earth's bounty -- not gold or money -- for survival.
A German miner was panning gold near Grass Valley while several Maidu maidens were digging
up roots and wild onions. Each began laughing at the other -- the miner thought the "diggers" (a
scornful name for Indians) were fools for digging for gold on shore, while the Indians figured
only a fool would dig for food in the stream.
James D. Savage, whose "Mariposa Battalion" drove 350 Miwok and Yokuts out of the
Yosemite area in 1851, made as much as $500,000 trading goods for their weight in gold with
Indian miners.
By 1850 California, once a relative paradise, had become purgatory for many Indians. About
100,000 gold-seekers swarmed over every mountain range, stream and hill from Keysville to the
Trinity Alps, Castillo said. "Most were unmarried men who may have started out with the best
intentions but ended up being crazed vagabonds with no females. This is an absolute formula for
disaster."
Between 1850 and 1863, Indians and other non-whites could not testify against whites in
California courts, thereby subjecting them "to the worst and most brutal treatment," wrote U.S.
Indian agent E.A. Stevenson in an 1853 letter from El Dorado County.
"The poverty and misery that now exists is beyond description and is driving the squaws to the
most open and disgusting acts of prostitution, thereby engendering diseases," Stevenson wrote.
Two Indians who tried to reclaim their brides from miners near Buckeye Flat were shot, one
fatally, "yet there was nothing but Indian evidence that could be obtained to punish these
villains ... they could not be convicted."
More than 3,000 Indian children were captured in Northern California and sold into slavery for
$50 to $200 apiece. California's legal "apprentice" system allowed settlers to keep homeless or
jobless Indians indentured until they were 30.
One Nisenan woman said she and others would blacken their children's faces to keep them from
being kidnapped into sexual slavery. "A good-looking Indian girl cost $100, according to the
Marysville Appeal," Castillo said.
In 1851, Congress ordered three federal Indian agents to negotiate 18 treaties of "peace and
friendship" with 402 California tribal leaders. The Indians were promised 8.5 million acres on 10
reservations in exchange for the rest of California.
Shasta and Wintu oral historians tell of hundreds of Indians being poisoned at a banquet in
November 1851 after signing a peace treaty with white settlers.
Ironically, Congress -- under pressure from California legislators who feared the promised lands
still held riches -- never ratified the treaties.
After the 18 treaties were "lost," an 1852 California Assembly report proposed that Indians be
removed "beyond the limits of the state in which they are found with all practicable dispatch."
Suggestions included Oklahoma, Oregon, New Mexico, Utah and Catalina Island.
State Sen. J.J. Warner went even further: " ... there is no place within the territory of the United
States in which to locate them ... .better, far better, to drive them at once into the ocean, or bury
them in the land of their birth."
Native oral historians tell of Indians being shipped to Alcatraz and Goat Island (now Treasure
Island) or being dumped into the icy ocean off San Francisco, though there is little written
documentation, Castillo said.
In the 1850s, newspaper editors and politicians -- not content to put Northern California Indians
on reservations -- called for their immediate extermination. The Legislature reimbursed the Eel
River Rangers and other volunteer militias to do the job. Indian families were massacred in
Auburn and the Napa Valley.
Many Indians -- forced to scrounge for food and shelter -- were arrested for vagrancy or
trespassing.
Jailed Indians were bought at auction by non-Indians, then forced to work off their bail like
indentured servants. When an Indian's indenture was up it was not unusual for his white master
to supply him with liquor -- then have him arrested for public drunkenness, thus renewing the
cycle of servitude.
Even Indian gold-seekers from other states looked down on the "diggers."
John Rollin Ridge, a self-described "wild half-breed" Cherokee Argonaut, called California
Indians "a peculiar and strange race ... illustrating the absolute primitive state of mankind ...
peaceable, friendly, kind-hearted, not brave but timid and yielding... (they) permit themselves to
be slaughtered like sheep in a shambles."
This was not true of many Indians -- the Modocs and other northern tribes fought on for decades.
In 1866 the Chico Courant editorialized: "It is a mercy to the red devils to exterminate them, and
a saving of many white lives ... there is only one kind of treaty that is effective -- cold lead."
Ridge, who mortgaged a slave to finance his trip west in 1850, was a man of deep contradictions.
As a boy, he witnesses his father butchered to death by bitter Cherokees who considered him a
sell-out for willingly leading the "Trail of Tears" that cost Cherokees their native soil. After three
months, he gave up mining and, writing under the pen name "Yellowbird," became a famous
poet and author whose works include "The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, Celebrated
California Bandit."
In 1857, he became the first editor of The Sacramento Bee, a name "emblematic of the industry
which is to prevail in its every department."
Indians worked as carpenters, farmers, ranch hands and servants during the Gold Rush, but few
prospered. By 1900, fewer than 16,000 remained.
"It has been the melancholy fate of California Indians to be more vilified and less understood
than any other of the American aborigines," said Stephen Powers in his 1877 book "Tribes of
California."
"They were once probably the most contented and happy race on the continent ... and they have
been more miserably corrupted and destroyed than any other tribes within the Union.
"They were certainly the most populous, and dwelt beneath the most genial heavens, amidst the
most abundant natural productions, and they were swept away with the most swift and cruel
extermination."
Into the moral abyss came the forty-niners, tempted by saloons selling rotgut, hoodwinked by
card sharks dealing monte and enticed by prostitutes in brothels.
It was said that while traveling by wagons to Sacramento, the immigrants abandoned religion,
leaving their souls on the plains like steamer trunks deemed too cumbersome for the journey.
Once in El Dorado, secular employment, with its promise of instant wealth, was so enticing that
even clergy grabbed a gold pan. Of the 46 Baptist preachers in good standing in the Sacramento
region in 1849-50, not one chose to do God's work. But not all was lost. As the population
increased, the social chaos was to sort itself out. Churches, synagogues and temples were erected
-- or congregations simply made do.
Missionaries held services in rented rooms, above gambling houses, in the streets, or anywhere
else they felt they could gain an attentive audience, wrote Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp in "Religion
and Society in Frontier California."
Church "disrupted the otherwise seamless garment of sinfulness," she wrote.
For eons, American Indians had practiced their own religion in harmony with the natural world
around them before the forty-niners came. The earliest European spiritual leaders in California
were Spanish-speaking priests who began a string of coastal missions in the late 18th century,
but had limited influence inland.
Six members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were hired to build John Sutter's
sawmill at Coloma. Five were at the site the day gold was discovered, according to Norma
Ricketts, author of "The Mormon Battalion: U.S. Army of the West, 1846-1848."
It was not until the journal of Henry Bigler, a Mormon, came to light that the actual discovery
date of Jan. 24 was established:
"This day some kind of mettle was found in the tail of race that looks like goald," Bigler wrote.
Sam Brannan, California's first millionaire, and leader of a group of Mormons who staked a rich
claim on what came to be called Mormon Island, broke with the church when Brigham Young
asked that he tithe the found gold.
"Bring me a receipt signed by the Lord and I'll gladly hand over to you the Lord's money," he
said.
By 1850, the Valley was being populated by Baptists, Catholics, Congregationalists,
Episcopalians, Jews, Mormons, Methodists and Presbyterians who made their way to the new
city and organized themselves into groups.
Into this nearly all-male society, Christians, Jews and adherents of the three main religions of
China -- Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism -- endeavored to bring moral order with their
religious beliefs and practices.
So it was that the Rev. Peter Augustine Anderson, a Presbyterian convert to Catholicism born in
New Jersey, arrived in Sacramento in 1850 -- the first American priest in California.
When Anderson arrived in 1850, he held Mass at 5th and L streets where Macy's stands today. A
total of 60 men -- all armed -- and 12 women attended.
The same year, on land donated by a congregation member, Gov. Peter Burnett, a church was
built at 7th and K streets. Anderson was to travel among the mining camps that year, celebrating
Mass and baptizing.
Pioneer life, with all its dangers, did not spare the men of the cloth. Anderson's life would end
the same year he came to Sacramento when the priest was stricken with cholera during an
epidemic that swept the city.
Anderson had been helping out in the tent hospitals when he contracted the disease.
"He died a martyr," said the Rev. William Breault, diocesan archivist. "Even though sick, he
didn't pay any attention to doctors. He kept anointing, hearing confessions and probably even
emptying bed pans on visits to the tents."
Other Roman Catholic leaders were to follow in short order: Bishop Eugene O'Connell
established the forerunner of the current diocese in Marysville in 1860; the Sisters of Mercy
schooled youngsters and healed the sick after their arrival in Sacramento in 1857, and miner-
turned-bishop Patrick Manogue built the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament.
Among the earliest church people were African Americans. They had no choice but to be locked
in a struggle, wrote Kevin Starr in "Americans and the California Dream."
While the state offered them some prosperity, they were persecuted: Southerners could still bring
in slaves and free African Americans were prevented from voting, forbidden to testify in court
and were limited to segregated schools, Starr wrote.
St. Andrews African Methodist Episcopal Church, established in 1850, became the focal point of
African American political and social activity for Northern California. On three occasions, the
church, now located at Southside Park, hosted the "California Colored Citizens State
Convention."
Temple B'nai Israel also traces its past to the Gold Rush. Moses Hyman gathered a handful of
Jews in his Sacramento store for the High Holy Days in 1849. Three years later, Temple B'nai
Israel was consecrated.
Jewish immigrants from Europe became merchants and prominent citizens, but they also tried
their hand at gold mining.
Robert E. Levinson, author of "The Jews in the California Gold Rush," cites newspaper clippings
to show that Jewish immigrants mined gold as late as the 1860s:
"Mr. A. Levy washed out eighteen pans of dirt, on Thursday last, and obtained $6.50 in gold."
For the most part, Jews in the Gold Rush were accepted as citizens of their towns -- on equal
footing with other European immigrants, concluded Levinson.
The Chinese were not so lucky: Political and labor leaders complained of a Chinese invasion.
Still, the Chinese put down religious roots, erecting temples.
Chinese temples were called Joss Houses, Joss evolving from the Portuguese word "Deus" or
God. The houses of worship were temples of the Chinese gods, wrote Alexander McLeod in
"Pigtails and Gold Dust."
"In every major gold mining town -- Weaverville, Sacramento, Downieville and Marysville --
the Chinese miners had their houses of worship," said University of California, Berkeley,
professor Ling-chi Wang.